More than two years after British voters approved a measure to withdraw their nation from the European Union—a gigantic undertaking with no roadmap of any sort —Prime Minister Theresa May unveiled a plan: essentially, that the U.K. would remain in

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected almost nine hundred billion dollars into the U.S. economy to help the nation recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Ninety billion dollars went to clean energy, with the intention of jump-starting a

Ten years after the financial crash of 2008, the economy is humming along, with steady growth and rising employment. Yet that crisis continues to shape our world, particularly through the rise of right-wing populism and the ever-worsening climate crisi

CleanDerek Smalls—Harry Shearer’s Character in “Spinal Tap”—Returns with His Solo Début

Harry Shearer is known for doing many characters, including Mr. Burns and others from “The Simpsons,” but the most famous is Derek Smalls, the saturnine, epically muttonchopped bassist in the movie “This Is Spinal Tap.” Almost thirty-five yea

Jonathan Blitzer spent a week in Mexico with the so-called caravan—a group of about five thousand migrants, most of them from Honduras, who are making a dangerous journey on foot to the U.S. border. Donald Trump, who has described the caravan as “

Janelle Monáe is an unlikely pop star. Her music is rooted in soul and R. & B., but also in pop, punk, and New Wave; her early releases were science-fiction concept albums, influenced by Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and modern Afrofuturism, set far

The actor Daniel Radcliffe is on Broadway in a new play called “The Lifespan of a Fact”—perhaps the first-ever work of theatre in which a fact checker is a starring role. Radcliffe’s character is obsessive about his work, and he becomes locked

When the acting Attorney General Sally Yates wouldn’t defend the so-called Muslim travel ban, she was promptly sacked—“before it was fashionable to be fired” in the Trump Administration, Jeffrey Toobin says. Yates, who served in the Justice D

While the big story going into the midterm elections has been the possibility of a “blue wave”—an upsurge of Democratic progressives, including a high number of women and minority candidates—the divisive political climate has also given us the

“You know, I think as I get older,” Joan Baez tells David Remnick, “someone will show me a photograph”—of the March on Washington, for example—“and I’ll think, ‘Oh my god, I was there. And those people were there, and Dr. King said wh

For democracy to function, we have to trust and accept the results of elections. But that trust is increasingly difficult to maintain in a world where malicious actors like the G.R.U., the Russian intelligence agency, have been actively probing our ele

This is part two of a two-part series. Part one can be heard here. On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days to live, she also found out that her wealthy family couldn’t pay his hospital bills. Her father, Te

After the election of Donald Trump, the feminist journalist Rebecca Traister began channeling her anger into a book. The result, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” combines an analysis of how women’s anger is discouraged a

Joan Jett cut a massive figure in rock and roll, starting in the nineteen-seventies and continuing with a string of hits including “I Love Rock and Roll,” “Bad Reputation,” “Crimson and Clover,” and others. Jett was kind of glam, kind of pu

On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days to live, she also found out that her wealthy family couldn’t pay his hospital bills: his fortune had disappeared. Katz didn’t learn how until several years later, wh

CleanLisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir, “Small Fry,” shares a common theme with many memoirs: the absent parent and the mark left by that absence in the adult writer. But the parent, in this case, is a figure who has also left his mark on the larger world. W

Before she published “Silent Spring,” one of the most influential books of the last century, Rachel Carson was a young aspiring poet and then a doctoral candidate in marine biology. Although she couldn’t swim and disliked boats, says historian Ji

The day after The New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s exposé about Harvey Weinstein, Farrow got a phone call from the actress and screenwriter Illeana Douglas. She wanted to talk about Leslie Moonves, who was then the head of CBS and one of the most

Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of leading thinkers on identity. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah also writes the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column, answering readers’ questions on a wide range of common but thor

Idalia and Arnold came to this country nearly two decades ago, from Honduras. They settled in a small city in New England and found the working-class jobs of the type common to undocumented Central Americans: janitorial, hotel housekeeping and construc

Like his father, Rev. Billy Graham, before him, Rev. Franklin Graham is one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, influential in the evangelical world and in the highest echelons of Washington. But where Billy Graham came to regret that he had

Ramadan Dabash is a civil engineer and a mukhtar—an Arab community leader—in his neighborhood of East Jerusalem. His run for a seat on the city council of Jerusalem has been making international headlines because the Palestinian community has long

David Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” which will return to HBO for its second season in September. He is even sympathetic to some of the pimps and mobsters who were involved in the early years of the porn business

Sergeant Edwin Raymond is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by a group of New York City police officers who have become famous as “the N.Y.P.D.-12.” They claim that, despite a 2010 statewide ban, officers are forced to meet monthly quotas for a

During the lead-up to the 2016 election, three actors who have played fictional Presidents of the United States discussed what it means to be “Presidential,” in a panel moderated by Michael Schulman. Bill Pullman, who, as President Thomas J. Whitmo

Seth Meyers—a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and the host of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—sat down at the 2017 New Yorker Festival to walk Ariel Levy through a career that seems charmed. As an unknown improv performer, Meyers was

Aretha Franklin brought Barack Obama to tears when she performed “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Carole King in December 2015. When video from that event went viral, it reawakened Aretha fans acr

Parker Posey has been a vivid presence in American film, especially indie film, for twenty-five years. She got her start in “Dazed and Confused,” and went on to appear in dozens of movies, including Christopher Guest’s cult-classic satires “Wai

We delve into the escapist joys of a great summer read. David Remnick talks with Lee Child, whose thrillers about Jack Reacher—twenty-three books and counting, with a hundred million copies in print—bring the mystique of the cowboy to modern Americ

CleanWilliam Finnegan Surfing, and Kristen Roupenian Among the Pilgrims

William Finnegan’s memoir, “Barbarian Days,” from 2015, holds the distinction of being the one book about surfing to win a Pulitzer Prize. On a Sunday morning, not long past dawn, he took David Remnick to the Rockaways for his first and only surf

All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime; in their tough Amsterdam neighborhood, and as children of an abusive father, it wasn’t a shocking development. But she was stunned when, in 1983, Willem and his

Tommy Orange had never read a book about what it means to be a Native American in a big city. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Orange says that urban Native writers like himself—he is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho trib

At the recent summit in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin proposed that, in exchange for letting Robert Mueller interrogate some G.R.U. agents who are linked to election hacking, the U.S. should turn over a group of officials and citizens to Moscow. The most se

Thomas McGuane, the acclaimed author of “The Sporting Club,” thinks fiction set in the American West could stand to lose some of its ranching clichés. The novelist, a consummate outdoorsman and devoted fisherman, met up with the writer Callan Win

The novelist and short-story writer Philip Roth died in May at the age of eighty-five. In novels like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,” and “American Pastoral,” Roth anatomized postwar American life—particularly the lives of Jew

The Navajo Nation covers over twenty-seven thousand square miles in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico; it’s an area roughly the size of West Virginia. Vincent Salabye grew up there, in a community troubled by memories of conquest by the United States Arm

CleanBrazil, Bruce Lee, and Black Lives in the Music of Kamasi Washington, and the Uncertain Future of the Democratic Party

Benjamin Wallace-Wells provides a survey of some key midterm races and considers what they tell us about the direction of the Democratic Party. And David Remnick speaks with the saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington. For anyone who thinks of jaz

CleanLove, War, and the Magical Lamb-Brain Sandwiches of Aleppo, Syria

When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, they left the war zone and traveled to Aleppo, Syria—then a beautiful, ancient, bustling city—and, w

Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the i

The author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein has become what Noam Chomsky was to an earlier generation of leftists. Her theories tie inequality and climate change together, arguing that capitalists use disasters to advance the

On a high-school speech-and-debate team, Hasan Minhaj learned the value of a joke: “If I made the judges laugh, I automatically saw an increase in the amount of points that I would get. And so I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a really powerful tool to g

The John Hughes films that made Molly Ringwald famous—“Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “The Breakfast Club”—look very different to their star now that she has a teen-age daughter of her own. Speaking with the writer and director

Border Patrol, which has forcibly separated families in border detention, has put some immigrant children in the care of a separate agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Although a recent executive order modified the Administration’s “zero to

Hannah Gadsby is a headlining comedian in Australia, a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is about to become a very big deal in America with a special on Netflix called “Nanette.” It’s a full-length comedy show, and at the same time,

Jane Mayer explains why Charles and David Koch are willing to spend as much as thirty million dollars on advertising that opposes Donald Trump’s campaign of tariffs—right as the midterm elections offer voters a referendum on his Presidency. And Dav

Donald Trump came into office promising to make so many cuts to the government that “your head will spin.” Evan Osnos has been reporting from Washington on how the Administration is radically changing the civil service, and he’s found that, to a

The 2018 World Cup begins this week in Russia, and America is taking a powder. The men’s team failed to qualify for the tournament after a stunning upset loss to Trinidad and Tobago, which is considered to be one of the worst teams in competition. Pe

Anthony Bourdain—the chef turned author, food anthropologist, and television star—died this week, at sixty-one. Bourdain made his début in The New Yorker in 1999, with an essay called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” about working in the res

When a young Amanda Petrusich, now a staff writer who covers music, first heard Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” she felt “almost like it was being beamed in from outer space.” The record, released in 1980, was strikingly original—a hybrid

Glenda Jackson, who has played both Queen Elizabeth and King Lear, served as a humble member of Parliament for more than two decades in between those roles; she talks with David Remnick about performing at eighty-two and about the state of British poli

Malcolm Gladwell spoke with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden in 2015 about the social dynamics of school shootings. Studying the literature of sociology, Gladwell compares shootings to a riot, in which each person’s act of violence makes the next

Paul Schrader made an auspicious début as the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and the director of “Blue Collar” and “American Gigolo.” But as Hollywood turned away from serious drama, Schrader struggled. Schrader is, above all, serious about

This year, the original members of the Breeders—indie-rock royalty—are back together, twenty-five years after “Last Splash,” an album that fans regard as a classic. Kim Deal, Kelly Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim MacPherson joined David Remnick

Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker based in Washington, speaks with Wendy Sherman about the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal. As the Undersecretary of State fo

Before she was placed on the list of Saddam Hussein’s enemies, the poet Dunya Mikhail worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. In her new book, “The Beekeeper,” Mikhail tells the stories of dozens of Yazidi women who survived kidnapping a

Senator Mark Warner is the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to explore the possibility of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign while avoiding a partisan blowup. Warner fears that that, with Russia, we’re confro

Last year, Glenn Close was on Broadway as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” reprising a role she had originally played in 1993. Since 1974, when she made her début on Broadway, she has won three Tony Awards and three Emmys, and has been nominat

In a career spanning more than forty years, the biographer Robert Caro has written about only two subjects. But they’re very big subjects: Robert Moses, the city planner who brought much of New York under his control without holding elected office,

Inspired by “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, Patricia Marx gets herself ready for the apocalypse. The only problem: Marx is a writer, not a Silicon Valley mogul. She isn’t super-rich, or even regular-rich. Apo

This week, a reporter looks at a rural town where the largest immigration raid in a decade has ripped apart a community; Ronan Farrow talks about his reporting on Harvey Weinstein, which just won the Pulitzer Prize; and Jeffrey Toobin speaks with a rom

Last week, Andrew Andrew Sean Greer's novel "Less" won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. "Less" about a novelist in mid-life named Arthur Less, and his attempt to avoid the wedding of a younger ex-boyfriend by accepting invitations to literary even

In a long career in law enforcement, the former F.B.I. Director James Comey aimed to be above politics, but in the 2016 election he stepped directly into it. In his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey makes the case to America that he handled the F.B

The staff writer Rebecca Mead recently observed the seven-hour surgery of woman she calls Abby. (To protect her privacy, Abby’s real name was not used, and her voice has been altered in the audio of our story.) Abby, who is trans, had undergone h

As a conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat fills the post once held by no less a figure than William Kristol. A devout Catholic, Douthat opposes the progressive direction in which Pope Francis is leading the Church—to prioriti

Frank Oz was a teenager when he started working with Jim Henson, the puppeteer and filmmaker behind the Muppets. Oz went on to create characters like Bert, Cookie Monster, Miss Piggy, and Yoda from “Star Wars.” Michael Schulman is a contributor t

Emma González is a survivor of the Parkland attack, and a leader of the #NeverAgain movement. She talks with David Remnick about the ways her life has changed since the shooting, and why activism comes naturally to the teens spearheading the new push

Every week, a New Yorker cartoon is posted online and printed in the magazine without a caption, and thousands of people write in with their suggestions. Readers vote on a winner, and the top pick is printed in the following issue. Willy Staley and M

When police showed up to question John Thompson, he was worried that it was because he had sold drugs to an undercover cop. When he realized they were investigating a murder, he could only laugh: “S**t, for real? Murder?” Thompson was insistent o

Abdulqader Hilal Al-Dabab was the mayor of Sana’a, a politician with a long record of mediating disputes in a notoriously fractious and dangerous country. Earlier in his career, he accepted a position at which his two predecessors had been assassinat

As the Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency fourteen times, claiming that the Obama Administration had overreached with policies intended to curtail climate change—a phenomenon which Pruitt views skeptic

Tens of thousands of refugees from the civil war in Yemen have fled across the narrow Mandeb Strait to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Nicolas Niarchos reported for The New Yorker from Djibouti, where Yemeni refugees cross paths with Ethiopians escapi

As the fourth season of “Veep” came to an end, director Armando Iannucci turned from chronicling the foibles of cynical western democracy to something darker still: life under dictatorship. He found his source material in the French graphic novel

Bandi is the pen name of a North Korean writer. He is believed to be a propaganda writer for the government who began to write, secretly, fiction and poems critical of the regime. (Details of his biography cannot be verified, because identifying him pu

The dossier—a secret report alleging various corrupt dealings between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the government of Russia, made public after the 2016 election—is one of the most hotly debated documents in Washington. The dossier’s author,

Henry Worsley was a husband, father, and an officer of an élite British commando unit; also a tapestry weaver, amateur boxer, photographer, and collector of rare books, maps, and fossils. But his true obsession was exploration. Worsley revered the Ant

Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for her first Oscar at twenty, and since then she has balanced the biggest of big-budget franchises, like the “Hunger Games” and the “X-Men” series, with smaller, prestige films, including “Silver Linings Playb

Richard Brody hosts an alternative Oscars show — “The Brodies” — and recommends some of his favorite films from the past year, and the writer Chang-rae Lee takes us to a sprawling international supermarket in Honolulu, Hawaii.

CleanMasha Gessen on Trump and Russia, and a Former Border Agent on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Masha Gessen was born in the Soviet Union and has written extensively about Russian politics. She talks with David Remnick about the similarities between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman talks with a former Bord

No film adaptation of “A Wrinkle In Time,” Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved, and often banned, children’s book, published in 1962, has ever made it to American movie theaters. It finally comes to the screen next month, with a cast that includes Op

We now know that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social media to sow division and undermine the election of 2016, and special counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted Russian nationals and Russian entities for this activity. During that

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, recently travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre ar

CleanRyan Zinke’s Deregulation Quest, and the Future of Meatless Burgers

As a congressman from Montana, Ryan Zinke was considered a moderate—he resisted radical suggestions, for example, to turn over federal land to the states. But, as Secretary of the Interior, he is at the forefront of the Trump Administration’s push t

CleanLaura Kipnis on the State of #MeToo, and a Night at Richard Nixon’s

Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and a provocative feminist critic. Her book “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” states, “If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.” She has been accused of

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had commercial and critical success: Her best-seller “Americanah” won a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and a speech she gave on feminism was sampled by Beyoncé. But Adichie is skeptical of

Nathan Lane may be best known for supplying the voice of the fun-loving meerkat in “The Lion King,” but in recent years he’s turned his focus to more serious roles. Now he’s playing the villain, Roy Cohn, in a new production of Tony Kushner’s

The Ku Klux Klan was originally focused on maintaining the old racial order in the postwar South, chiefly through the violent suppression of African-Americans. But, in the nineteen-twenties, the Klan was reborn as a nationwide movement, targeting not o

David Attenborough’s films for the BBC—impeccably researched, ambitiously filmed, and executed with style and imagination—have set a high bar for nature documentaries in our time. Over sixty years, his films have taught generations of us about t

A tougher stance on immigration is the signature position of the Trump Administration, and the President’s first year in office has been marked by sharply increased arrests of unauthorized immigrants. In this hour we explore immigration and deportat

CleanTracee Ellis Ross on Being a “Black-ish” Woman and Jon Hamm Gets His Life Back from Don Draper

Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays Dr. Rainbow Johnson on ABC’s “Black-ish,” joins Doreen St. Félix for a conversation about television, race, and self-acceptance. “Black-ish” has a reputation for breaking boundaries and tackling political and rac

Jerry Seinfeld talks with David Remnick about his Netflix special “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” which is part standup show, part memoir. They discuss his “coming out” to his parents as a funny person, the labor that goes into an effortless joke, how

Lucian Wintrich, a young blogger, was recently appointed as the White House correspondent for the conservative political site Gateway Pundit. He has no professional experience as a reporter and doesn’t claim any interest in landing big stories. His g

In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz; Trevor Noah, of “The D

Leonard Cohen was one of the world’s greatest songwriters, and a figure of almost cult-like devotion for generations of fans, including Bob Dylan. David Remnick sat down with Cohen in the summer of 2016, at the musician’s home in Los Angeles to dis

For decades, The New Yorker has published a poem on or around Christmas -- a look back at the events and people that have shaped the past year, generally light and fun; but in more difficult years it touches on quite serious themes as well. The humorist

CleanChildren’s Letters to Satan, and a Changing of the Guard at the New York Times

Every year, countless poor spellers accidentally address their Santa letters to Satan. Satan—played by Kathleen Turner—always replies. Matt Passet’s Daily Shouts piece is performed by Kathleen Turner, in the role of Satan. On January first

Nicolás Maduro was an unlikely successor to Venezuela’s popular and charismatic Hugo Chavez. And, since his election, the country has been wracked with devastating food shortages, a breakdown of ordinary services and medical care, and rampant violen

Roy Moore was a classic Trumpian candidate: a political outsider of extreme positions, rejected by the establishment and plagued by accusations of scandal. He eventually garnered the full support of Donald Trump, but Moore was finally too much for vote

The business reporter Sheelah Kolhatkar has recently written for The New Yorker about a wave of advances in robotic technology that will have dangerous implications for our economy and political stability. As more and more factories automate, many work

When the Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped in an attack by friends of her rival Tonya Harding, the scandal riveted the nation; twenty-four years later, it’s the subject of the new film “I, Tonya.” In 1994, the New Yorker staff writer S

Barry Blitt wasn’t into politics—music and hockey were more his things—but as an artist he’s become one of the keenest observers of American politicians. Blitt has contributed more than eighty covers to The New Yorker, many of which are collect

Residents of Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, live through each hurricane season in fear of a major storm that would decimate their land. With its highest point only four feet above sea level, the island loses ground to erosion every year, and it

In October, 2016, Bruce Springsteen appeared at The New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with David Remnick. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation.

In his review of “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. “All happy families are alike,” Lane wrote, but “every unhappy family, in its own way, belongs in

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein have opened the floodgates for women in other industries and walks of life to go public with claims of sexual misconduct—and to be heard instead of dismissed. Ronan Farrow, who broke the Weinstein story for Th

CleanLove, War, and the Magical Lamb-Brain Sandwiches of Aleppo, Syria

When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, they left the war zone and traveled to Aleppo, Syria—then a beautiful, ancient, bustling city—and, wh

Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the i

Donald Trump memorably claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of votes cast by undocumented immigrants had given Hillary Clinton the popular vote in the 2016 election. More circumspect conservatives argue that voter fraud is a real proble

CleanJeffrey Toobin on “The Most Important Supreme Court Case in Decades”

Jeffrey Toobin tells David Remnick that, despite the mounting indictments against members of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Trump is almost certainly safe from impeachment. Republican House members, Toobin says, have no incentive to moderate

In “Slut: The Play,” Katie Cappiello captures the trauma of sexual assault, based on the stories of teen-agers in her theatre company. (Hilton Als wrote about the play for the magazine.) A member of the cast, Mary Miller, tells David Remnick that t

When OxyContin came on the market, in 1995, physicians were understandably wary of the addictive potential of a powerful new opioid. As Patrick Radden Keefe reports, the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed OxyContin to physicians, claimi

The British writer, activist, and rapper Riz Ahmed has had a very public life since leaving drama school to star in “The Road to Guantánamo.” He won an Emmy for playing the lead in “The Night Of,” appeared in the Star Wars film “Rogue One,

In 2010, the Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, sent nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. The leak earned Manning a thirty-five-year prison sentence, w

CleanMy Mother’s Career at “Playboy,” and the Politics of N.F.L. Protest

The death last month of Hugh Hefner reopened a conversation about the “Playboy” founder and the world he created. Hefner said that his magazine’s pictures of naked or near-naked women were an empowering blow against puritanism; his critics argue

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, launched her career as a guitar virtuoso—a real shredder—in indie rock, playing alongside artists like Sufjan Stevens. As a bandleader, she’s moved away from the explosive solos, telling David Remnick, “There

Patricia Marx is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and Roz Chast is a celebrated cartoonist. Chast’s book “Can’t We Please Talk About Something More Pleasant,” about dealing with her aging parents, was a best-seller in 2014, winning a

CleanThe Trump Children Were Investigated for Fraud, But Avoided Indictment

The Trump SoHo was supposed to be a splash for the Trump Organization and for Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr., who were leading the project. Instead, they were stuck trying to market very small units to buyers as the financial crisis hit. That they lied i

A crime reporter and a business writer try to figure out how the government can charge a bank a sixteen-billion-dollar fine for wrongdoing yet fail to prosecute any individual at that bank for a crime. Plus, a long walk with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausg

David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry

Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently won her sixth consecutive Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy for the role of Selina Meyer, the hapless Vice-President turned President, in HBO’s “Veep.” The show has been on for six seasons so her record is perfect. In

Donald Trump mocked Kim Jong Un by calling him “rocket man,” and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if the U.S. or its allies were attacked. Kim, in turn, dismissed Trump as a “barking dog Evan Osnos recently reported from Washington

Since the Inauguration, in January, there’s been a kind of protest renaissance for those on the left and some in the center of American politics; at rallies and marches, they’ve dusted off chants and songs that became symbols of resistance during t

CleanHillary Clinton on the “Clear and Present Danger” of Collusion with Russia

Hillary Clinton harbors no doubts, she tells David Remnick in a long interview, that political allies of Donald Trump astutely “guided” the release of hacked e-mails by WikiLeaks and the planting of fake news in order to sabotage her. In a new book

A magical time of unfettered creativity but zero productivity, the days before the Internet were so strange that it’s hard to believe they were real. Clearly no one got anything done, ever. Jenny Slate performs Emma Rathbone’s “Before the Interne

When is speech no longer just speech? David Remnick looks at how leftist protests at Berkeley, right-wing violence in Charlottesville, and open-carry laws around the country are testing the traditional liberal consensus on freedom of expression. He spe

We have yet to learn just how closely the views of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch resemble those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative and a standard-bearer for the legal philosophy known as originalism. O

We take for granted that popular entertainers can and should advocate for causes they believe in. But until Harry Belafonte pioneered that kind of activism in the middle of the last century, stars largely kept their political leanings private. In the l

Nick Lowe made it big as a pioneer of what the English called “pub rock” and Americans usually call power-pop. Lowe had his biggest successes in the New Wave era but continues to release records and perform, and six of his middle-period records are

John Ridley has been active in in film and television since the nineteen-nineties; he also has seven novels under his belt, as well as a play and several graphic novels. And, since the release of “12 Years a Slave,” for which he wrote the screenpla

The New Yorker’s Josh Rothman finds it hard to get a conversation going about romance novels with male friends or acquaintances. He talked with Curtis Sittenfeld—whose fiction often contains a romantic story, though her books aren’t romance novel

Jason Matthews spent over thirty years in the C.I.A., working in the former Soviet bloc and other hot spots, and when he retired he turned to the next best thing: writing spy novels. And while they’re contemporary—Vladimir Putin appears as a charac

Removing plants from Central Park is illegal. But when Manhattan salad bars are charging up to $8.99 a pound, what’s a thrifty New Yorker to do? After receiving a lesson in edible plants, Patricia Marx picks a salad of things growing in the park, avo

At an undisclosed location in Western Europe, a group called Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is gathering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government. It’s unclear when or how Assad might ever stand tria

When Al Franken ran for Senate, his years as a founding writer on Saturday Night Light and as the author of books like “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” were held against him. So once in Washington, he buttoned up his sense of humor. Until now.

Ryan Lizza and David Remnick listen to excerpts from the infamous late-night call that ended Anthony Scaramucci’s brief term as White House communications director. While Scaramucci’s behavior and language on that call were shocking even by Trump

CleanAn Irish Novelist’s Début Explores Friendship and Adultery in the Digital Age

The Irish writer Sally Rooney, who is twenty-six, wrote the first draft of her début novel, “Conversations with Friends,” in a several-month-long torrent of creativity, when she was just twenty-three. Rooney’s editor calls her a “Salinger for

George Strait is a superstar of country music. He rarely gives interviews, but he agreed to speak with Kelefa Sanneh, who marked the occasion by ironing his shirt. Lawrence Wright talks with David Remnick about the politics of Texas, which he sees as a

Maggie Haberman covered Donald Trump years ago for the New York tabloids. Now, in the White House, she has a front-row seat to an Administration in which “rival gangs” are vying for control. Plus, Bob Odenkirk’s amazing exercise tips, and Bruce

Phil Davies doesn’t seem like a mad scientist bent on conquering another planet: he’s a mild-mannered general practitioner in a small town in southern England. But, with a telescope and an array of lasers, he’s making a claim that he owns Mars, a

The future of health care in America hangs in the balance as the Senate releases a revised bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. David Remnick talks with the historian Jill Lepore, and with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an architect of Obamacare who has met

Lucinda Williams won a Grammy for the song “Passionate Kisses,” which was performed by Mary Chapin-Carpenter; but she spent many years overlooked by the music industry: she was too country for rock and too rock for country. In 1998, American musi

James Taylor’s songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. On stage at the New Yorker Festival in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences: the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Taylor played a few of his h

Donald Trump’s winter White House is his private club and family residence, Mar-a-Lago. We go there ourselves to take the political temperature of Palm Beach and sample the President’s brand of Chardonnay, while, somewhere nearby, the President deal

Donald Trump’s policy of “America First” gives a rising China more room to flex its muscles. This week, we consider from many sides the complex relationship between the U.S. and China. David Remnick talks with Ai Weiwei, the dissident and global

As scientists learn more about how genes affect everything from hair color to sexual orientation and mental health, we’re faced with moral and political questions about how we allow science to intervene in the genetic code. In this episode, Siddhartha

The director James Ivory talks about the film “Maurice,” based on a groundbreaking E. M. Forster novel—a gay love story with a happy ending. Jon Lee Anderson, who has covered Latin American insurgency and war, talks about his prison interview wi

A reverend and political activist thinks that Democrats and Republicans alike need to bring a sense of morality and Christian love back into their politics. But he’s not shy about calling conservative policies “heresy.” Paul Theroux, best known